There was a wonderful rabbit I ate in Barcelona, which was dry but wet, salty but not too salty, and above all garlicky. This recipe came out of attempting to recreate it. In fact, except for the garlic it is nothing like it, but still delicious nonetheless.

Last week’s update was delayed due to me having a nasty summer cold. This will be another one of those two update weeks.

My wife and step-father in-law have wanted for years to have rabbit for Easter dinner. The thought of Peter Cottontail in pieces on the kitchen table was a bit too much for my mother-in-law, but this year I finally managed to make their dream come true and take care of an update all at the same time.

When you pull a rabbit out of the cryovac plastic, it looks sorta like they skinned and gutted a cat instead of a rabbit. I suppose we really have to take them at their word because I don’t know how I’d be able to tell otherwise. Thankfully farm-raised rabbit tastes exactly like chicken, and the final result tasted very chicken-like. So I’m just telling myself that it was rabbit and am moving on.

After 15 minutes of hacking, I had two rabbits in pieces, ready for browning.

In cast iron dutch oven I poured in some olive oil, got it smoking hot, and then began working on achieving a nice Maillard reaction with the rabbit. Once the pieces were sufficiently browned, I moved them out of the dutch oven.

I can’t begin to describe how tough it is finding large, uncut pieces of bacon with the rind intact. As much as America loves its bacon you think it’d be easier to procure. Big chunks of smoked streaky bacon was as close as I could get. The chunks were dropped into the still hot dutch oven with two dozen shallots. I let the shallots get a bit soft and soak up some of the rendered off bacon fat.

I placed the rabbit pieces back into the dutch oven along with some dry sherry, white wine, chicken stock, a bouquet garni and eighty–that’s right, 80–cloves of garlic. When Mr. Henderson says “above all garlicky” he means it!

Everything was brought to a boil, then I put the lid on and placed it into a medium hot oven for an hour and a half.

Here’s the dish plated. The initial taste was exactly what you would expect: chicken with bacon and garlic goodness. The garlic had become soft and sweet, and as the book requested I instructed my Easter dinner guests to suck the flesh from the unpeeled cloves. This was a great recipe, and I’m looking forward to making it again. Hopefully it’ll be before next Easter.

One down, one hundred and fourteen to go.